The Labor Party campaign launch today should be a lesson in why waiting till your last week for a campaign launch is not a good idea: because it could fall flat.
In a very close campaign today’s Labor launch won’t hurt Julia Gillard’s chances, it just won’t do anything extra for them, and that would’ve really helped right now.
There was nothing new in what Gillard had to say today, and was made doubly painful by a meandering and confused speech by former Prime Minister Bob Hawke.
It didn’t start too promisingly, with warm up speeches from Anna Bligh and Wayne Swan, whose contribution to motivational speaking is roughly the same as the Canwich to fine cuisine. But at least Bligh and Swan gave speeches that were recognisable as such.
Bob Hawke was then greeted to the stage, and the former PM proceeded to give the audience a really good but very long impression of Grandpa Simpson.
There was obviously some discussion about drawing on the Hawkie renaissance inspired by the Hawke telemovie. This discussion ignored the fact that these events took place between 20 and 30 years ago, and that while Hawke may have given one hell of speech to the ACTU in the early eighties, now he just comes across like the last premiership winning captain periodically rolled out by a desperate football club.
Gillard’s assumption to the stage was strangely Spartan, hardly any music, no screen show and not a balloon in sight. All of which I accept is unnecessarily superficial, but would go some way to reminding people they were watching a campaign launch and not the Grade 6 weekly assembly.
The speech was one we have not only heard before, but one that has planted itself on repeat in our brains like some futuristic torture machine. There was her love of hard work and a reminder that her parents got jobs out here in the sixties, of course choosing not to join the vast ghettos of unemployed Welsh migrants commonly found in Adelaide at this time.
Gillard awkwardly paid tribute to Kevin Rudd, and to his credit resisted the urge to remove his shoe and throw it her at her head.
The message we were to take from this speech was consistent with the Labor message this campaign: Julia’s Labor provides a prosperous and positive vision for Australia, compared to Tony Abbott who is a stupid and scary man who’ll ruin the economy. This is all effective, but today’s speech won’t make people tune into that anymore than they could have or would have already.
There was a good policy announcement which boiled down to allowing rural Australians to claim on Medicare e-visits to specialists and late night doctor consultations via the internet. The first really just adds a Medicare item to something already being done. The second is reliant upon there being doctors willing and able to do any of this. An online doctor is still a person who has to wake up and 12:30 and has to be willing to help to help out, and if they’re not there or two busy the broadband isn’t going to make a difference. But still, points for linking health and broadband issues.
The crescendo was a bastardised version of Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can”, replacing it with the less impressive “Yes We Will”, which, at this point, is what Labor have to keep telling themselves. Maybe that was the point of today - a large mutual reassurance session for the ALP.
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